News Update

Students, scholars want California universities to hire undocumented students

Students and some of the country’s top legal scholars are proposing that the University of California hire undocumented students.

According to the New York Times, a group of students planned to present a letter to University of California president Michael Drake on Wednesday, proposing that the university hire undocumented students as research and teaching assistants and for other jobs.

Federal law prohibits hiring undocumented immigrants, but at least 26 legal scholars are arguing that states are exempt from this law. The legal analysis was drafted at UCLA and is backed by immigration and constitutional scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, New York University Law School, Cornell, Stanford and Yale, among other universities. Conservative immigration experts question the argument.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has allowed some students to be hired legally in the past, but many current undocumented college students in California are not eligible to apply for DACA, because since 2017, no new applications for DACA have been accepted. Many of these students could not apply before the restrictions were put into place, because they had not yet turned 15.


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